


New Life

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bed chats, F/M, discussion of personhood, discussion of souls, no discussion of pregnancy despite the title, they get quite philosophical at three am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 04:57:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9368906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which a conversation about AIDA ends somewhere Jemma didn't anticipate.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lapiccolina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapiccolina/gifts).



Jemma’s just about drifting off to sleep, warm in flannel pajamas and Fitz’s arms, when he stirs slightly under her and taps her arm with one finger. “But really, what kept AIDA from being human?”

Jemma sighs wearily. “Fitz, you can’t—”

“No, I mean.” He sighs as well, lifting his head from where it rests atop hers and nudging her slightly so she’ll meet his eyes. Expecting to see more of the guilt as deep as an ocean that’s been washing over him for the last three days, she takes a moment to tighten her grip on him, hoping the interlocking of their fingers will anchor them to earth. Only when she looks up, he’s squinting thoughtfully, and he turns a little to better face her. “I know she wasn’t—er, _it_ wasn’t human. But really, why not? She looked like a person. She seemed to have sentience, at the end—she could think her own thoughts, feel things. She didn’t breathe, I suppose, but, er—”

“And it couldn’t evolve on her own, or reproduce. You know the definition of life as well as I do, Fitz.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

He falls quiet, resettling his arm around her as he makes the soft settling noises meant to lull her into calm. She isn’t fooled. His fingers keep up a steady tattoo against her bicep and the noises keep up longer than they would if he was really going to sleep; he tends to sleep quickly and deeply, her Fitz, unless something’s bothering him. Turning onto her side, she props her head up with one hand and strokes his cheek with the other. “You’re thinking about life in a philosophical sense.”

Matching her posture, he nods with no small amount of relief. “There’s a difference between AIDA and Watson, even, and it isn’t just that she had a face. _It_ had a face.”

“The only difference was programming you and Dr. Radcliffe gave her,” she says gently. “You could upload the program into a different shell and it would be exactly the same thing, no matter how it looked.”

“Okay, but—”

“No but, Fitz. Anything more was worth you put onto AIDA. You thought about it as though it was a person, or at least a very special program.”

He takes her hand from his face and holds it gently, watching the track of his thumb as it sweeps gently across its back. “If you think about it as a person, does that make it one? If it thinks of itself as a person?”

“Ugh, Fitz.” She groans, flopping over onto her back and putting the hand not in his over her eyes. “It’s nearly three in the morning. This is not the time for philosophical debates out of every science fiction ever.”

“But none of them have ever given us a satisfactory answer, Jemma! Are they or aren’t they?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She huffs. “Are AIDA and I the same? Are we equally people?”

“Of course not,” he shoots back so quickly she’s surprised until he adds, somewhat petulantly, “See, you’re conflating the issue. I didn’t say anything about being a person, you did. I only asked if it was alive.” His voices cracks a bit on the last word, and he pauses before almost whispering, “I don’t want to kill _anything_ alive.”

“I know, Fitz.” With her eyes still closed, she pulls their clasped hands to her mouth and kisses his knuckles.

The backs of his fingers trace her jawline. “Of course you aren’t the same as AIDA. I don’t care how magnificent it was.”

“I wasn’t really fishing for compliments,” she murmurs, but she accepts them anyway as he leans over her to press them to her cheeks and her nose and her turned-up lips.

“You deserve them,” he says as he comes to a stop with a final, tender kiss to the scar above her eyebrow. She has to close her eyes for just a second to catch her breath, and when she opens them again all her good oxygenation is moot, because he is looking at her like she holds the secrets of the universe and she can feel them expanding outwards through her chest. When he looks like that, words fail; she could pour through the entire unabridged OED and not find the right ones. “I love you,” she tries anyway.

He kisses her again. “I love you too.” Smoothing out her eyebrow where his affection has disarranged it, he sobers, tracing over the bridge of her nose and across her cheekbones.

“What?” she asks, smiling.

His finger stutters as it dips over her top lip. “Do you ever wonder if there’s such a thing as souls?”

“What?”

She shoots up on her elbows and would probably whack foreheads with him if he wasn’t so attune to her silent signals. Settling back a little, he takes her hand again and plays with her fingers. “I know it’s not scientific. We’re just energy, right, and when we die our energy changes into another form. But I wonder, sometimes.”

“You do? Why?” An idea makes her eyebrows rise. “Is this about AIDA? You think she isn’t alive because she doesn’t have this indefinable soul?”

“It’s not about her,” he says, “believe it or not, I can’t really think about androids when I’m kissing my beautiful, brilliant girlfriend.”

“Well, you’re clearly thinking about something, so—”

“About you, of course,” he blurts out, not looking at her. “You’re so incredible you make me almost believe in the existence of souls. I can tell myself over and over that you, Jemma Simmons, are a happy accident of chemical reactions and your experiences, but it doesn’t seem like enough to explain how amazing you are.”

“And a soul would be?” she asks, her forehead wrinkling even as, unscientific as it may be, her heart melts a little in her chest.

“I don’t know.” He glances up through his eyelashes, shy as the day they met. “But at least then you wouldn’t just disappear. There’d still be a you, somehow. There’d be a me. And maybe, I don’t know, we’d keep being together.”

She can feel her mouth wobbling in the way it does when she’s on the verge of doing something that would embarrass her grandmother, and she reaches to pull him down to her. He doesn’t joke this time. He is tender and sweet and perfect, as always, his skin like sandpaper and silk, his scent like home. Biochemists know better than to believe that there’s something eternal about humans in particular, are fully aware that this thing called life is nearly impossible to define, but in this moment she remembers that once scientists didn’t know about bacteria, either. The universe surprises so often only a very stupid person would assume they know everything about it. She, herself, holds very few things with iron grip anymore, and most of them are contained in the unfathomable wonder of the man beside her. She cannot and does not want to have any sort of existence without him.

With one hand on his cheek, she tips them apart so their foreheads rest together. The air between them belongs to them both.

“I’ve never wondered,” she says quietly, watching the way his eyelids flicker and the shadow his impossibly long eyelashes make on his cheekbones. “It seems rather impossible. But I know that I can’t imagine my life without you, Fitz, and I think that whatever happens to us when we aren’t us anymore, we’ll keep being together. Whether it’s our energy or something else we can’t fathom now.”

He nods, shaking both their heads. “Together or not at all,” he says, quoting possibly one of the few truly great lines Steven Moffat ever penned.

“But not, I hope, with time travel,” she says lightly. “Space travel’s quite enough for me, thanks.”

She expects her joke to change the mood, but he twists a strand of her hair around his finger and tugs on it lightly, sending a shiver down her spine. “What do you call it,” he asks thoughtfully, “if it’s only our energies continuing on together?”

She gently pushes him to settle back against his pillow, putting her head on his chest and his arm back at its rightful place around her shoulders. “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, don't you think? Whether they exist in the exact way people use it or not, ‘soulmate’ gets the point across nicely.”


End file.
